Fall 2010 Meeting Summaries

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Fall 2010 Meeting Summaries

Following each gathering of the teaching larger classes community of practice, Educational Development will summarize highlights of our discussion. These will be captured below under each meeting date. If you have additions or amendments to the summary of each meeting, feel free to edit.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010.

Due to low participant attendance, we did not hold an official meeting today. We chalked this up to it being the last full week of classes and a busy week with two other Communities of Practice also scheduled!

This was our last meeting date for the term. The next meeting will take place on Wednesday, January 12th, at 1:00 p.m. If anyone has any suggested topics for discussion or resources that they would like to share at this meeting, feel free to let us know. We'd also welcome any feedback about your experience in the Community of Practice this term and/or suggestions for improvement.

Jeanette McDonald (jmcdonald@wlu.ca X3211)
Sally Heath (sheath@wlu.ca X4017)

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Teaching Larger Classes Community of Practice this term. Hoping to see lots of previous and new participants in January!


Wednesday, November 10, 2010.
In this meeting of the TLC CoP, the following topics came up in our discussion:

  • The value of having students reflect upon their own learning process and how to acheive this. Mercedes Rowinsky-Guerts talked about how she is using the Blog feature of MyLearningSpace for this purpose and that it has been a very positive experience so far. Students in her class use the blogs to discuss how and what they are learning, and offer advice to one another. Mercedes indicated that the online blogs have helped to create a greater sense of community within her course. Everyone agreed on the value of reflective actitivies in helping studnets to understand how they learn, but there was understandable resistance to taking away too much class time in order to accomplish this.

  • The challenge of dealing with "helicopter" or "velcro" parents who want to be too involved in their children's university career. Bob Jefferson brought up a particuarly troubling situation he'd been dealing with about such a parent who was very persistent in trying to become active in her daughter's academic life. This article, which was published in The New York Times this past summer, suggests that "velcro parents" are definitely a growing North American phenomenon that many institutions are working hard to deal with. Laurier's Policy 10.1 regarding Information Availablility and Privacy Protection can be found here. In accordance with this policy and Ontario's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, professors are not allowed to discuss the academic performance of a student with a parent unless the student is present themselves.

  • Alex Latta surveyed the group for suggestions about how best to structure the first year class of 450 students that he will be teaching next term. The class is scheduled as a two hour block. Given that the average attention span is roughly 20 minutes, how we can make the most of the entire class period? We talked about the value of chunking lectures into sections and balancing lecture time with engagement activities. The benefit of using clickers was suggested as one method to encouragement engagement in large classes.

Our next meeting will take place on Tuesday, November 30th at 10:00 am.



Tuesday, October 19, 2010
In our meeting on Tuesday, October 19th, we focused on the following issues in our discussion:

  • Teaching in specific classrooms on campus (e.g. BA101) and the impact that this has on activity selection and interaction capabilities. Bob Jefferson discussed how he has used clickers successfully in place of group work in his larger classes to achieve interaction. From this topic, we extracted some larger principles such as how learning activity selection is related to one's teaching philosophy, goals for the individual course or class, and contextual factors such as class size, physical space, and student level (e.g. first versus fourth year students).
  • We also talked about ways of leveraging the Learning Management System through the use of activities such as quizzes, surveys, or polls in order to maximize contact time in the classroom. In classes where there is a great deal of emphasis on information transmission, it was suggested that some content could be moved to an online environment (where students would be responsible for covering it themselves) through the use of technologies such as pod- or screencasts.
  • This led into a survey of various low threshold educational technologies, such as wikis, blogs, podcasts, and screencasts that can be incorporated into a course to encourage student writing and collaboration (blogs, wikis), or to provide lesson content so that students can repeat and review material (podcasts, screencasts).
  • Michael Imort reported on his visit to Chris Anderson's PO110 class as part of the Open Classroom initiative. He indicated that it was somewhat discouraging sitting in the back row and seeing how students were trying to multitask between taking notes on the PowerPoint slides and other computer activities. Bob explained how he has succesfully banned the use of laptops in one of his courses and how, surprisingly, there has not been much negative feedback from students about this. Bob invited Tristan Long (new faculty in Biology) to come in and observe one of his larger classes.


There was no formal agenda set for our next meeting on Wednesday, November 10th at 10:00 a.m. We'll focus on any ideas, questions, or challenges that CoP members want to bring to the meeting!


Below are some of the resources related to educational technologies that may be of use to CoP members:

Resources:
What is screencasting (Library resource)
Sample Screencasts from the Library (registering your OneCard)

Sample Podcast (introduction to a lesson for a current online course)


Adding Narration to Your PowerPoint Slides

7 Things You Should Know About series (technology briefs), EDUAUSE

Educating the Net Generation - see section four from table of links to browse examples of Web 2.0 assignments (e.g., wikis, blogs, podcasts, etc.) and what students and faculty throught of them.

2009 EDUCAUSE ECAR Survey of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology Each year, the EDUCAUSE ECAR initiative publishes a report on undergraduate students' use of information technology and their preferences for technology incorporation into their education.


Wednesday, September 29, 2010

In our inaugural meeting of the Teaching Larger Classes Community of Practice, we debated and discussed the following topics:
  • How do we incorporate writing activities into larger classes if there is insufficient T.A. support?
  • How we do we balance the teaching of disciplinary content with the need for skills-based instruction in large classes, which generally tend to be first year courses?
  • How can we use our contact time in class most constructively? What material can we move to an online environment? How can we reduce classroom content to focus on quality rather than quantity of information being presented?
  • How can we vary our instructional methods or experiment with different strategies if we encounter resistance from colleagues teaching the same courses?
  • How we work with the physical space limitations in some of our classroom spaces at Laurier (e.g. group work in classrooms with fixed seating)?
  • How do we raise student awareness about available campus services (e.g. Counselling, Learning Services, Writing Centre)?

Several participants mentioned their willingness to share learning objects that they had developed that may be of interest or use to other CoP members, including:
These learning objects are also available from the "Participant Practices" section of the website.
It was suggested that in our next meeting on October 19th that we focus on educational technology options, such as podcasts, screencasts, and lecture capture tools that can be used to help transfer information transmission to an online environment and free up contact time for other active learning experiences. We also discussed sharing examples of writing activities that can be integrated into the large classroom.